Case Study: Carbonite and Stackify’s Retrace

”We turned on APM+ and within a couple of minutes were able to identify the issue and a few hours later push out a fix.”

Who is Carbonite?

Carbonite is a leading provider in backup recovery and archiving solutions for small businesses and home users. We fuel continuity by providing powerful yet simple tools to help keep businesses in business. We were building hybrid application that spans Microsoft Azure cloud in our private data centers. Using ASP.net, Angular JS, Azure Storage, SQL Server, and of course Stackify. We are using Stackify in an application that is the front-end of everything that Carbonite does for its customers. Whether it’s for purchasing, account management, product management and downloads.

Using Stackify we’ve identified as memory leak within 45 minutes of installation.

After installing Stackify’s Retrace we were able to identify a memory leak within about 45 minutes. We had an intermittent problem with a few of our servers, but by the time we notice there was a problem the machine already re-booted, which means that any information that would have helped us was gone.

We’ve set up an alert with Retrace to notify us if memory usage went above 75%, it sent me an email, I was able to login, get the memory dump and within 20 minutes figure out what needs to be fixed.

How does Carbonite use Stackify to improve application performance?

Carbonite is using Retrace, Stackify’s application performance management tool, for log management, error tracking and server monitoring. The combination of these tools together making the platform very powerful. Retrace allows us to quickly and easily identify performance issues all the way down to external calls, database queries, and even individual methods.

We turned on Retrace and within a couple of minute were able to identify the issue.

Retrace has been an outstanding addition to tour tool belt. The ability to see such detailed performance information without code changes has been undeniably and incredibly beneficial. Recently we had a performance problem that could only be reproduced in production. We turned on Retrace and within a couple of minutes were able to identify the issue and a few hours later push out a fix. Without Retrace we would have added 10s if not 100s of log statements in an effort to get some of the information that Retrace gave us with the push of a button.

Why we chose Retrace over other APM tools.

We started looking initially at log management solutions because our existing solution wasn’t cutting it. We had some apps that were writing to event logs others that were writing to local log files and still others that were overloading our inbox with emails. There was no good way to combine all that data, much less to get any qualitative information.

Stackify’s Retrace was intriguing for a couple of reasons, one it offered everything we were looking for in terms of centralized location to view log information, error management, alerting, as well as monitoring regardless of which application, hosting location or environment. On top of all that they were much better priced than all competitors. We looked at five or six competitors and ultimately we found that even ignoring price, none, other than Stackify, gave us everything we were looking for.

Setup and Installation

Setup and configuration were extremely simple. Being a .NET developer we used NuGET to install into our application. Stackify has a very easy installer and scripts and whether in Azure or on-premise.